Abraham Verghese

A regular contributor to The New Yorker (among other publications), Abraham Verghese is one of those rare doctors who can write, in the process redeeming our faith not only in medicine but in humanity. He burst onto the literary scene a decade ago with My Own Country, which recounted his experience as a young Indian African doctor who found his way to a rural Tennessee town during the onset of the AIDS crisis. His elegant and moving portrait of the families he met there, struggling to cope with a disease that presented both moral and medical challenges, revealed the man behind the doctor. Now hes back with his first novel: Cutting for Stone (Knopf, $26.95). The book travels deeper into personal terrain. It takes place, in part, in his native Ethiopia, following a medical family that lives there during the violent political turmoil that forced Verghese to leave the country. As the story moves to America, it mixes medicine, immigration, and love in ways that are bound to be more authentic than anything youll ever see on E.R. NINA SHAPIRO